Summing across many tabs

cbridger 

Here's an example of a Pivot Table that takes data from a single year-long database and summarizes it by month. It's not exactly what you asked for, but it illustrates how one of Excel's more popular features (the Pivot Table) can be used with a single database to separate out the monthly data.

A common mistake of new Excel users--and an understandable mistake--is to think that it's all clearer if we tabulate matters on separate monthly sheets. But that actually makes it harder for Excel to do what it can do very well, which is to take a single database and extract monthly (or quarterly, etc) data for summary reports. We tend to mimic the paper-based method of record keeping, which made sense when recording data on big manual accounting sheets...but interferes with the computer's ability to extract meaningful summaries.